Estate of Georges Mathieu
Georges Mathieu (b. 1921) played a decisive role within abstraction during the movement’s burgeoning in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He departed from the geometrical abstractions that had dominated the previous era with a visual language that favored form over content and gesture over intent, and instead aimed for uninhibited creative expression. He termed this newfound aesthetic “lyrical abstraction,” after a description of his work by the French critic Jean José Marchand in 1947.
Early in his career, Mathieu established a parallel between his work and Chinese calligraphy, notably their shared characteristic of spontaneity. Following a dialogue with Dr. Chou Ling and China’s 20th-century master of calligraphy Zhang Daqian in 1956, Mathieu published an essay titled “Connections between certain aspects of lyrical, nonfigurative painting and Chinese calligraphy.” In it, he asserted that unlike Western calligraphy, which was limited to the “art of copying,” the most liberated works of Lyrical Abstraction (he cited those of Pollock, Kline, Degottex, and Hantaï) underwent the same “processes” as the calligraphy of the Far East, exuding “a primacy of the speed of execution,” the absence of any “preexistence of form,” the absence of any “premeditation of gesture,” and an “ecstatic state.” Calligraphy was one of the hallmarks of Mathieu’s work. In the 1940s, he was the first to consider a theory of abstract calligraphy and the principle that signs could precede their meanings.